Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/58

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46
The Southern

he had done Simms' to Yeadon. He charges Slidell with many "niaiseries, an abundance of very bad grammar and a superabundance of gross errors in syntactical arrangement."

The next is Anthon's "Sallust." The last critical notice which Mr. Poe wrote for the Messenger was of Anthon's "Cicero." He was very partial to that gentleman as an author and they were also personal friends. He recommends Mrs. Trollope's "Paris and the Parisians" to all lovers of fine writing and vivacious humor, and touches up the Americans for having been unnecessarily atrabilious towards her book of flum-flummery about the good people of the Union. He praises highly Paulding's "Life of Washington."—By the by, a Francis Glass, of Ohio, published a Vita Washingtonii, in Latin, which was reviewed ironically in the Messenger for December. Mr. Poe is favorable to Mr. Robert Walsh's "Didactics" and Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper's "Sketches of Switzerland." Mr. Walsh was a contributor to the Messenger. Mr. Cooper suppressed a good part of his work for fear that it would not be acceptable to his own countrymen. A criticism by O. (probably J. F. Otis), of Grenville Mellen's poems, is adopted, and Mr. Poe adds, in full, "a spirited lyric," by Mellen, with which he was "specially taken" and which was